The Great Divide

fertility, and because they lived on milk, blood and meat, their gods were sky gods – storms and winds – and horses. Their religious ideology was very different from those of the more settled societies and the endemic conflict between nomads and settled peoples was both destructive and, in the long run, creative.
The virtually continuous conflict introduced into Eurasian history over 2,700 years, from 1200 BC to AD 1500, by the fact that highly mobile pastoral nomads were at all times more or less threatened by climatic factors (the weakening monsoon and the drying steppe) was one factor in bringing about the end of the Bronze Age, the destruction of the great palace states created on the back of the horse-drawn chariot, and eventually provoked the great spiritual change known as the Axial Age, the great turning away from (man-made) violence and the epochal turning in, which produced a new ideology, or morality, and culminated – this time among the pastoral nomadic Hebrews – in the idea of monotheism. It was, according to Daniel Hillel, the fact that the nomadic Hebrews wandered between so many different ecological habitats, that gave them the idea of one overarching God that governed all environments.
Greek rationalism, and Greek science, in particular the Greek concept of nature, partly brought about by a close examination of domesticated mammals and how their nature compared with human nature (whether they had souls, whether they had morals, whether they had language, whether they could suffer, chapter nineteen), when adapted to the Hebrew idea of a single, abstract god, eventually gave rise to the Christian idea of a rational God, who favoured order in the natural world, whose own nature could be gradually uncovered at some point in the future because He favoured order . And this idea, of the possibility of progress , of God revealing himself gradually, by means of linear history, as was outlined in chapter twenty-two, helped to create many of the innovations that would enable human-kind to explore the Earth via its great oceans.
The many and varied tribes of pastoral nomads emerging on and then escaping from the central Asia steppes continued in the millennium-and-a-half after Jesus Christ. It assisted and hindered the east-west movement of goods and ideas, but above all maintained Eurasia as a landmass across which there was much rapid movement. The horse also proved to be a vector for the transmission of disease (the plague) across the same landmass, which had the dual effect – again in the long run – of promoting the wool industry in the north of Europe, the sheep providing the substance of the first great industry in the world, but also forced the inhabitants of the western Mediterranean to look for alternative routes to the East, where so many spices, silk and other luxuries came from. Together, these factors helped open up the Atlantic.
    Again, we must emphasise that these developments were separated in time, location and ultimate effect; there was no inevitability about them – each of them, although they all involved domesticated mammals, was quite discrete. In a sense this is a meta-narrative of history but it is by no means a straight line, or even a line at all, more a series of punctuated events linked only by the involvement of domesticated mammals.
    A further point is that most of this activity in the Old World took place in temperate zones (between seven degrees north and fifty degrees north), that is to say where the seasons were pronounced, where the planting and growing periods were carefully delineated. The seasonally characteristic nature of essentially fertility worship contributed to the organised nature of what was early religious life but it also had a far more important ideological corollary: it worked . The simple biology underlying a religion where fertility was the central issue, in temperate zones, was that – sooner or later – vegetation started to grow again. The cycles of planting and growth didn’t invariably work, of course, when drought or rain bringing floods or other factors interfered with the rhythm (the bible’s ‘fat’ and ‘lean’ years) but, essentially, far more times than it failed, fertility worship worked. In pre-literate societies, against a weakening monsoon, rituals would have grown more elaborate, and priests may have lost some credibility now and then but, by and large, until the development of monotheism and more abstract deities, largely